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When all is said and done, I think the best and also the creepiest thing
about this movie is the opening. The film begins with a sequence showing
Gore's victory celebration after (he thought) winning Florida in the 2000
election. Moore starts asking "Was it real? Or was it a dream?" The past
that we could have had is displaced by the one that actually happened, as
Fox News 'calls' Florida for Bush, the other networks issue retractions,
the Supreme Court rules, and Gore finally concedes. Then he shows what for
me was probably really the most depressing and shocking part of the movie:
the protest by members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the
certification of the 2000 presidential election results. As president pro
tem of the Senate, Gore is stuck overseeing the procedure that will ratify
the illegitimate election of his rival. According to the rules of order, an
objection can only be registered if it is backed by at least one member of
the Senate. All the people bringing objections to the floor are members of
the House, and they're all African-American, and they are all protesting
the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Florida. One by one
they go through the same ritual: my objection is in writing, it is signed
by me and many of my constituents and colleagues, but we could not find a
single senator willing to sign it. And one after another gets dismissed by
Gore and his gavel, while the senators sit there and watch.
I don't remember coverage of any of that. It's sickening to watch now,
knowing what happened afterward. Like all of his Senate colleagues, Gore
was afraid to challenge the election because he didn't know what would
happen otherwise and was afraid to find out. What *would* we have done if
the Congress had refused to certify the election results based on those
objections? Gore goes on banging that gavel as if he doesn't care; but he's
got to know that he's in a painful and impossible situation. He's afraid,
as we were all afraid, to acknowledge what's really happening. It's easier,
he's thinking, it's safer, it's better for the country to accept the
Supreme Court as the final authority and resign himself to four years of
George W. Bush instead of opening the floodgates of God knows what kind of
civil war.
That sequence ends with Moore's voiceover saying, "It wasn't a dream...it
really happened that way." And then Moore begins what is probably the most
important sequence, structurally speaking, in the film: the opening
credits. The black and white text of the credits is intercut with footage
that Moore dug out of some newsroom's vaults of members of the Bush
administration being made up for the cameras before their media
appearances. One by one we see Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Ashcroft, and
Wolfowitz facing the camera as hands reach out from beyond the shot to
smooth their hair down, dab powder along their foreheads and cheekbones,
smear on foundation, and attach earpiece wires to the backs of their
collars. It picks up the theme he's already established and sets up the
frame for the rest of the story. These are our national leaders; but they
are also actors being made up for the parts they are about to play. What
these players are about to perform, and what you have been living through
for the past three and a half years, is a scripted, rehearsed, staged
narrative designed to manipulate you. And, of course, so is this movie.
That, to me, is the best thing about *Fahrenheit 911*: it captures the
sense that we all have of being in wonderland, where something can be a
dream and real at the same time. Everything that this administration has
done has been, in some sense, fake. Bush's ranch in Texas is fake; his
cowboy act is fake; his rationales for war are fake; the personae they
present to the public are fake. And at the same time, all of this artifice
and absurdity produces horribly concrete results--dead children, destroyed
homes, mangled bodies, wounded soldiers, death, poverty, grief. For them,
it's all a show, and they can walk away when it's over--and they do, in a
closing sequence that mirrors the first, and shows the same players turning
away from the camera, revealing the wires running down the backs of their
necks as they walk out of the shot. The rest of the film's subjects are
stuck living the reality these actors have created.
That frame is also a self-conscious commentary on Moore's own methods, and
that's another thing that I think makes *Fahrenheit 911* better than his
other efforts. Moore is on camera less here than in any of his other
movies; there are the obligatory grandstanding stunts (Moore asking members
of Congress to get their children to enlist to help the war effort; Moore
driving around in an ice cream truck reading the text of the USA Patriot
Act through a loudspeaker so that all the legislators who signed the bill
without reading it can finally find out what it says) but in most of the
film he lets the events and his subjects have the camera. But he's always
there behind it all, arranging and editing and creating the narrative, and
the constant voiceover never lets you forget it. The frame acknowledges and
accepts in advance the criticism Moore knows he's going to get--that the
film is biased, slanted, manipulative. Sure, he says. It is. And so is
every other story that we have been told, by the Bush administration and
the media, about what was really going on.
The most emotionally involving use of this staged/real dichotomy is the
segment of the film that follows Linda Lipscomb, a Flynt woman whose son
Michael is killed in the Iraq war. Initially identifying herself as a
"conservative Democrat" who's insanely proud of her country and of her son
and daughter serving in the military, and who admits to having "hated"
people who were protesting the Vietnam War and Gulf War, Lipscomb walks us
through her reaction to the death of her son and finally winds up heading
to the White House for a symbolic confrontation with the man who ordered
him into battle for a war that, as the film has long established, was not
fought for any legitimate reason. As Moore's crew films her conversation
with a protestor who has camped out in front of the White House, another
woman walks into the shot and starts arguing with her, saying that "all
this is staged." Lipscomb says, "My son was not a stage," and when the
woman finally starts to become convinced that in fact Lipscomb is a real
person whose son really has been killed in Iraq, she calls out "Blame Al
Qaeda!" as she walks away.
Well, Lipscomb is real and so is her grief and so was her son; but she is
also being staged. Moore is using her the way the soldier's mother has been
used time and time again--as a way of making the son's sacrifice real,
palpable, and emotionally affecting for the viewer. She presumably knows
that her grief is being staged, since she has consented to be in Moore's
film--because he knows, and probably she knows it too, that unless someone
can tell this story in the language that American mass media consumers have
been trained to understand, it will never reach them. And that is one thing
that Moore does extremely well: explain things that most Americans assume
they have no prayer of understanding--such as, for instance, the web of
interlocking international corporate influence that makes the Bush family
dependent on the Bin Laden family--in terms that are familiar and graspable
because they are drawn from the same sensationalist idiom used on them by
the mass media. That's what makes these movies successful; and that's what,
I hope to God, will make them influential in November.
There's a lot else in the film, which is essentially devoted to telling the
story of how the Bush administration manipulated the public response to 911
in order to generate support for an unnecessary and illegitimate invasion
of Iraq that they had already been planning to do anyway. I focus on the
stuff I just talked about because so much of the rest of the film is
already familiar to me--so familiar that I couldn't really feel anything as
I watched it other than a sense of weary dread. For other viewers, no
doubt, some of this stuff will be more powerful. There is some very
disturbing footage from the Iraq war. One of the more sinster segments is
the video from a Christmas Eve raid on a Baghdad family's house, in which
American soldiers bust in looking for their 'target,' search the house,
terrify the women, and finally end up knocking him down and cuffing him and
then dragging him out. While all this is going on, the soldiers are yelling
in English, the family is yelling in Arabic, and a female translator is
vainly trying to get everyone to calm down so she can explain what's
happening. The Arabic dialogue is subtitled, so that we can understand what
the women are saying but the soldiers in the scene cannot. And what they're
saying is what anyone would be saying in that situation--what do you want?
What has he done? Why are you taking him? But of course the soldiers don't
answer, because they can't understand any of it; they leave the translator
to deal with all that while they go ransack the house. And then there's the
cut back to the officer calmly explaining from his HQ that this war is
really all about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
But most of the second half of the film follows the American soldiers and
not the civilians; and this must also be a calculated move. Moore knows
that his audience will care more about the American casualties, and so, I
would venture to say, does he. As ironic as it is, the film does show a
kind of hurt, baffled, but still sincere patriotism which attaches most
strongly to the soldiers who, as Moore says, have done something amazing by
agreeing to give their lives for their country, or as he puts it to go into
battle "so we don't have to." And, as he has been arguing all along, it is
precisely these people, and their families, who have been screwed the
hardest by the administration that turned "support the troops" into a
universal dissent-quashing mantra.
Biased, slanted, manipulative: yes, absolutely. Just like all the other
stories we've been told. But at least this time, it's a story that hasn't
been told before, at least not in the mainstream media for a general
audience. And at least this time, it might have the effect of getting
people to ask questions, instead of encouraging them to sit down, shut up,
and watch their neighbors for signs of disloyalty to the homeland.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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